From the start of the so-called war against the so-called “Islamic State” I wanted to write about the similarities (and some differences) between the new scourge and that old menace of the “Jewish State.”

The similarity is so obvious that many other writers have already written long and wide about it: The attempt to establish a state based on religion by zealots that have little to do with the religion itself but find it as an easy pretext to force their rule… The exclusion of anybody that doesn’t abide by the “state’s religion” and the resort to massacres and ethnic cleansing… The total denial of Human and Civil Rights of the population under their control…

There are also important differences that should be noticed, both between the two movements and in the response of the world to their behavior.

The emergence of the “Islamic State” movement was an extreme response to a state of extreme oppression, both in Iraq and in Syria, where sectarian-based regimes systematically oppressed the population and bombed their own cities. Zionism was from the beginning a colonialist movement – not resisting anti-Semitism in Europe but using it to mobilize settlers to rob and oppress the native inhabitants of Palestine.

This comparison is mainly directed at the western public opinion, which is so shocked by the atrocities of the “Islamic State” but allows its political leadership and state apparatus to arm, finance, and provide legal impunity to the “Jewish State.”

Accelerating toward the wall

Typically, when we compare the bearded, eye-rolling head cutters to the shaved, tie wearing types that bomb cities by remote-control, much of the western public opinion may resist the comparison, even though from the point of view of the victims, the “civilized” appearance and after-shave smell of their torturers doesn’t count for much.

Recent events in Palestine, particularly in Jerusalem, open a new arena for comparisons. In a series of calculated steps, the Israeli establishment and extreme settlers and religious groups are undermining any hope of a political settlement and pushing for more confrontations.

The last “round” concentrated around the Israeli attempt to change the “status quo” in the Aqsa mosque and Al-Haram Al-Sharif on which it is built. Like many times before, Jewish religious holidays, when most Israelis have more free time, are used to concentrate efforts to get on Palestinian nerves and rights, invoking Palestinian anger, and hence unleashing a deadly response from the Jewish state’s army and police against the Palestinians.

For many of Israel’s western supporters, even for many ordinary Israelis, the deliberate provocation of conflict around Islam’s thirds holiest site looks like madness. But it is only the latest in a series of provocations, from the abolishment of the promised release of old prisoners that halted the imaginary “peace negotiations,” to the re-imprisonment of Palestinian prisoners that were released in the last prisoners’ exchange, and, of course, the almost daily announcement of new settlements on stolen Palestinian land. Israel also put obstacles on any attempt to reconstruct Gaza after its massacres campaign this summer, trying to provoke another deadly round.

This new wave of provocations is nothing new for Zionism. Already in the beginning of the 1980’s the “Jewish Underground” not only killed innocent Palestinians – which was common practice all along Zionist history – but actually planned to blow Al-Aqsa mosque to provoke an all-out religious conflict. Those “heroes” found wide sympathy in official Israeli circles and spent only symbolic periods in prison.

Actually, Israel’s racist regime was never fond of “Apartheid” – Separation – in the sense of separation between Jewish settlers and the Arab natives. When it builds walls, it is for separating Arabs from their lands, but they put Jewish settlements and army posts on both sides of the wall, in order to provoke more conflict and continue with ethnic cleansing. Gaza is the exception, because it is such a densely populated area, and the main reason for the Israelis to pull out was that they prefer to handle it with bombs, not bullets.

Within the framework of a zero-sum conflict, where survival is equal to the demise of your enemy, extremism is not necessarily hot-headed.

For many Sunni Arab, the appeal of the Islamic State stems from the despair from any democratic political settlement. The IS bullies are the guys that will fight it to the end. Frightening your enemy counts more than appearing logical or ready to compromise.

For the Jewish State zealots the competition for extremism is not only for internal populist reasons either. On one hand the Israelis like to appear mad in order to make everybody expect unproportional violent response in any conflict. But the current spree of provocations doesn’t sum up to deterrence… by initiating confrontation, the Israelis want to find the excuse to use more of their military superiority toward their basic goal of controlling all of Palestine, “free” of the Palestinians. Ethnic cleansing was and is what Zionism is all about.

The Zionist leadership is encouraged by the deep splits and internal conflicts in the Arab world to unleash unrestrained attack against the Palestinians. They get unlimited support from the counter revolutionary A-Sisi in Egypt and from other reactionary forces that are even more hostile to the Arab masses after they felt a danger to their privileges from the Arab Spring. But by their attacks on Muslim holy places, they might go one provocation too far – arousing against them the anger of the masses all over the region.

ODS is for everybody

For a long time we are struggling for One Democratic State in Palestine – ODS. It is the most obvious alternative to Zionism – bringing back the Palestinian refugees and building a state to serve all the people of the country, not only the believers of one religion.

Now that the conflict in the Arab world has developed into civil wars, where the sectarian divide is manipulated by local dictators, the perspective of ODS, a civil state for all its inhabitants, looks like the only reasonable solution for many other countries in the region as well.

But recent developments also made some of our activists despair of the perspective of ODS in Palestine. Israel is becoming more belligerent, and there are no sign of democratization. Well, this is a reason of despair only if you expected ODS to be the result of democratization of Israel. I never thought this was on the cards. ODS will be achieved as a result of a victory of the Palestinian national liberation movement over Zionism. The fact that Zionism is getting ever more awful only implies that we should be better organized to bring this madness to its end and repair the damage to make the country inhabitable again.

There are many reasons why I didn’t write any political analysis at the time of this bloody war.

One reason is that I only wanted the war to be over, to stop the bloodshed, while I knew that the longer Gaza can stand in the face of the Israeli genocidal rampage, the better the chance that the aggressors will not get what they want and that the siege of Gaza, which, in the long term, is even more destructive to Human lives and development, will be lifted.

But the best excuse is that throughout this war the monstrous Israeli war machine seemed clumsy and clueless, while the Gaza resistance seemed to keep cool and know what they are doing.

I preferred to keep quiet and do my small thing by demonstrating against the aggression.

Now, that the war is over, what can we learn from it politically? I will try to do it short, going over many different aspects of this war, hoping to write in more details about some of them soon.

Who Won The Military Confrontation?

Great wars end with the winning side conquering territory or even with the loser signing his surrender.

The Israelis say they could conquer Gaza, but they didn’t do it. In fact, they already did it twice, in 1956 and in 1967. When they withdrew from Gaza in 2005 it was without agreement, after they paid a heavy price in two Palestinian intifadas. The fact that Gaza was not occupied again is the combine result of the expected resistance to the act of occupation and the memories of the resistance over 38 years of continued occupation. Any way you count it, the resistance is what keeps Gaza free of direct occupation.

Without gaining land or surrender, isn’t war all about killing people and destructing their livelihood? The Israeli officers, politicians and experts run to the judge of history crying: “We killed more than 2,000 people; we destroyed the homes of almost half a million Gazans, what they did to us is nothing to compare. You must declare us winners!”

But this is not the way the war is decided. We live in the world of expectations. Everybody knew that Israel has the military firepower to destroy Gaza. If the war is not for total annihilation of the other side, then it is fought to prove something about the relationship of forces.

Like Lebanon’s Hezbollah in summer 2006, the Palestinian resistance in summer 2014, led by the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, surprised Israel both with their technical preparations and with their fighting power.

Missiles and mortars – The previous Israeli onslaught on Gaza, just in November 2012, ended with a few rockets that reached the Tel-Aviv metropolitan area, where most of the Israelis live. Now, for the first time, Tel Aviv was systematically targeted, putting in doubt the Israeli assumption that it can wage its wars on other people’s lands without being targeted. From the first days of the confrontation, as they had no effective way to stop the rockets flying, the Israeli military commanders claimed that the resistance is running out of ammunition. By the end of the first week they declared that a third of the missiles were already used. After 51 days of war the only possible conclusion is that they didn’t have any idea how many rockets there were. The only bright side for the Israelis was the development of the anti-rocket systems, which limited the practical damage they suffered. It is still an open question how much of this is real technological success and how much is the weakness of the new Palestinian rockets. Yet, you should remember that many of the people in Gaza that were launching these rockets spent their summers as kids throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. They have many reasons to feel that they are making progress.

The Tunnels – In this war the Palestinian resistance gave a new dimension to the old notion of Underground movement. It compensated for the overwhelming Israeli firepower and Israel’s full control of the air and the sea with this simple, old technological solution. The tunnels that went under the fence and behind Israeli lines where only a small addition. The Israeli fixation with “destroying the tunnels” (whether real or simulated) enabled the resistance to kill many more soldiers inside Gaza than those killed by attacks through the tunnels.

Endurance – Israel was not prepared for a long confrontation. In the end it was the longest war of its kind. Typically the Israeli political thinking was that they should buy as much as possible political time in order to let the army do its thing (They call it “Let the IDF win” – even though they don’t even remember when they last won, nor have any idea what such a win should be…) On the other side the Hamas leadership made an up-hill job during the long days of fighting and negotiations to improve the functioning of the new Palestinian unity and heal some of the breaches in the Arab solidarity. In the end news of rockets in Tel Aviv fell on the Western news somewhere between car bombs in Baghdad and an earthquake in Iceland – not a ranking that the Zionist state, as the spoiled child of the world’s top powers, can let themselves be in.

For all these reasons, this military confrontation created some shift in the completely imbalanced balance of power in favor of the Palestinians.

The Politics of the War

The military confrontation is just the tip of the iceberg of a much wider confrontation between political entities, societies and economies. Each side in our days is deeply dependant on a supportive “camp” of states, people and cultures.

Israel started this war at what seemed like an optimal combination of political circumstances. The suffering of the Palestinian people tends be shadowed by the bloody mayhem in Syria, Iraq, Libya and other Arab countries. The Western powers have lost any purpose or semblance of direction in handling the conflict in Palestine and their attitude is defined by their prejudice against Palestinians as “terrorists” and by the mantra about “Israel’s right to defend itself”, no matter what any of the two sides is doing.

The Palestinian resistance entered this war in the worst regional conditions. It has never been more isolated. The Egyptian state is now controlled by a boiling counter-revolution that regards Hamas as an extension of its main enemy, the Muslim Brothers. The traditional supporters of the resistance in Iran and Syria are busy putting down the insurrection by the Syrian people and didn’t forget Hamas’ taking sides with the revolt against Bashar. So the resistance in Gaza was left with only Qatar and Turkey as active political backers for its aspiration to break the siege.

In these conditions, developments throughout the war didn’t bring any massive breakthrough but did help gradually to tilt the edge toward the resistance’s side.

In the beginning of the war Israel was exited by its own unity around the sacred cause. This wall to wall unity is typical to the settlers’ community in Israel at the beginning of any war and is held together by complete disregard to the Palestinians as Human beings and by the long practiced rituals of self-victimization. But recent developments in the Israeli society meant that racist extremism, the logical conclusion of the settler mentality, took control of politics, the street and the media. Before the end of the war most of the ruling coalition and half of the war cabinet turned to “talkback attacks” on the government and the military leadership for failing to satisfy their militarist dreams. The atmosphere of internal terror against any opposition to the war helped to silence political opponents but didn’t make the “internal front” much stronger.

On the other side the Palestinians entered this war with a newly established “unity government” that started its period by the PA President Abbas declaring that security cooperation with the occupation is “sacred” and failing to transfer wages to tens of thousands of government employees in Gaza. The Israelis hoped to use Abbas to add pressure on the Hamas-led resistance in Gaza.

As the attack on Gaza enraged Palestinians elsewhere, there was a massive popular mobilization – most significantly in Al-Quds, where there was a local Intifada after the burning to death of Muhammad Abu Khdeir. In the 1948-occupied territories Palestinian youth held the widest confrontations with the police since October 2000, in which more than a thousand were detained. In the West Bank there were several mass demonstrations and several demonstrators were shot dead by the Israeli army.

In the end it was the Palestinians that played the unity card, succeeded to form a united list of Palestinian demands and a united negotiating team. Israeli and Egyptian “achievements” like letting Abbas’ men control the border crossings are no more than face saving for them to cover their agreement to relieve the siege. What extra “security” for them will the Palestinian guards give as anything that goes through the crossings is already scrutinized by the Israelis or the Egyptians?

On the Arab level Hamas made the best in the worst conditions. For some time the Palestinian cause was again at the center of attention. There were demonstrations in many places, massive ones in Jordan, some even in Haleb (Allepo) in spite of continuous bombing by the regime. In these conditions every Arab government felt obliged to pay some lips’ service to show support for the Palestinians. Even the Egyptian government had to temper down its instinctive hostility.

Throughout the world there was a wave of activity and support for the Palestinian cause. Naturally “Stop the War” was accompanied by “Lift the Siege”, “BDS” and “Free Palestine”. The Latin American left, which took control of most of the state in South America over the last decade, gave important moral support, led by Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first Indian and Socialist president, who endorsed BDS and declared Israel a terrorist state.

Public opinion in the Arab World and the West also forced some rethinking in the ruling imperialist circles. It mostly came in two waves: First the temporary suspension of air travel to Tel Aviv, later re-examination of some weapons’ supply by the US, Britain and Spain. This doesn’t mean that the Western powers overcame their racist instinct – we have seen, for example, the European initiative toward the end of the war to re-condition the lifting of the siege of Gaza on its demilitarization – just as the Israelis themselves all but dropped this condition. But Israel is not as high as it used to be in the imperialist agenda – it is just another source of problems. Its imperialist masters have almost forgotten when was the last time that it served their interests in any effective way.

What Next?

The future of Gaza is still uncertain. Even when you reach agreement with Israel (or with Egypt) there is no guarantee that it will be honored, as happened with the agreements after the previous (2012) war and with the 2011 prisoners’ exchange. Yet Gaza is fighting for liberty…

It required one intifada to bring in the PLO and another intifada to throw away the Israeli army and settlers. The Israeli withdrawal in 2005 enabled the relatively free 2006 elections and the establishment of the Hamas government. By 2007 Hamas succeeded to implement the elections result and take full control after aborting an attempted coup by a US trained militia led by Dahlan.

Gaza became the first (and till now only) part of Palestine under Palestinian control. Since then Israel makes everything it can to make this experience at Palestinian independence painful. In the last years its official policy is “differentiation” – to prove that lives under the occupation and Abbas in the West Bank is better than independence (and siege) under Hamas. Being loath to give anything to the Palestinians and driven by uncontrollable desire for settlements and land grab, it concentrated its effort on making life in Gaza a hell.

Gaza became stronger in spite of the siege and consecutive attacks. In the last war, for the first time, Gaza fought like a state, mostly by organized armed forces under central command. In the middle of the war Hamas’ leader, Khaled Mashaal, boasted that the resistance is killing soldiers while the Israelis are killing civilians. By the end of the war most Palestinian leaders agreed that the guarantee for their achievements is not any agreement but the power of the resistance.

But the struggle is not about Gaza – it is about the future of Palestine. And Palestine could not be freed while much of the rest of the Arab world is deteriorating into a bloody civil war. The heroic standing of the Palestinian during the latest assault on Gaza was an important reminder to the Arab people everywhere that the fight for freedom requires unity in the face of the oppressors and that it can be won even at the harshest conditions.

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Looking at the images of people escaping the Al-Fath mosque in Cairo today (Saturday 17.8.2013) under constant police fire, I stare at the terrified faces of those people, some of them injured, many lost friends and relatives in the massacre. I imagine that I see myself there, between them, running down the street.

But you’re not a Muslim Brother, some of you will wonder. But I do stand for principle. My land was not confiscated, but I was demonstrating in the day of the land in March 30, 1976. This is not a problem.

What I ask myself is whether I would dare to go to Rabaa Al-Adawiya while I knew that the army was preparing for a massacre. But, I encourage myself, on October 2, 2000, when we heard that the police shot at our friends in Um Al-Fahm, Nazareth, Arabeh and Sakhnin, killing some of them, we sat in the middle of Al-Jabal Street in Haifa and refused to move, even as the police were approaching to attack us. So, maybe, you could find some people of democratic and leftist principles in Cairo’s streets, ready to die with the Muslim Brothers to defend Egypt’s democracy and to oppose tyranny.

It is time to remember that eternal saying of the struggle for liberty: “If you’re not ready to die for freedom, you don’t deserve to live free”. It doesn’t intend to prevent the right for free life from anybody, no matter how coward or indifferent he or she may be. It comes to express the simple historic fact, that without the bravery and sacrifices of millions of freedom loving people we would all be slaves up to this day and till the end of history.

Basic Values

In these days of division, confusion, wild propaganda and outright terror, you should stick to the most basic values.

For me the killing of protesters is a clear red line. The Egyptian military regime clearly initiated and organized a massive massacre of peaceful demonstrators in order to consolidate its illegally acquired power.

And, by the way, any people that come to cheer up when the army or the police are shooting people in the streets are, to my taste, a despised lynch mob. If there happen to be many of them it is just a sad observation about the fragility of the Human soul – it has nothing to do with revolution, democracy or whatever.

Humanistic values should come first. They are the basic attitude, motivation and moral grounds behind any struggle for freedom and justice. Politics should come at the end of it – as calculated means to achieve goals. But when your politics loses its humanistic moral grounds it becomes a corrupt grab for personal or clique power.

Respect for the other is at the base of all Human values. How can anybody call himself a Democrat, a Liberal, a Leftist, a Socialist, a Revolutionary or pretend to belong to any other tradition that claims to speak for Human Rights and Dignity and support the rule of the army that kills demonstrators in the streets?

Democracy is at the Heart of the Struggle

The martyrs (Shuhada) of Rabeaa Al-Adawiya and all those shot demonstrating in Egypt over the last month and a half are martyrs for democracy. They demonstrated because the elected government of Egypt was removed by a military coup, not in order to promote any special partisan or religious agenda.

Unlike the demonstrators at Morsi’s days in power, they didn’t attack the presidential palace and didn’t constitute any physical threat to the army’s rule. The only threat from the demonstration was their moral claim to restore the democratically elected government. Their presence in the streets called off the army’s bluff as if it represents the Egyptian people. A-Sisi couldn’t stand the power of their words so he decided to drown their voices in the barrage of gunfire and rivers of blood.

Democracy is not a small thing, not a technical detail in the managing of the state apparatus. In all its forms Democracy is intended to represent the sovereignty of the people. The fact that the legitimacy for the state exists only as far as it serves the people. And the fact that the people themselves should decide by whom and how they should be served, not any Patron. Those Socialists that cite Marxism in order to dismiss Bourgeois Democracy ignore the basic fact that the Socialist criticism of it was based on the claim that Socialism will bring more democracy, not less of it.

The Arab Spring, like the Great French Revolution and all the great revolutions over the last 200 years were first and foremost about democracy. The rule of the people over the mechanisms of state power is inseparable from the right of the people to decent lives from all other aspects.

The Arab people will continue to struggle for freedom, democracy and social justice even in the face of the most murderous oppression. When one day democracy will be the only imaginable order of the day, all the tyrants will be seen as a remote nightmare and we will all thank those people that gave their lives in this holy struggle.

Israel

“The Israelis, whose military had close ties to General Sisi from his former post as head of military intelligence, were supporting the takeover as well. Western diplomats say that General Sisi and his circle appeared to be in heavy communication with Israeli colleagues, and the diplomats believed the Israelis were also undercutting the Western message by reassuring the Egyptians not to worry about American threats to cut off aid.

“Israeli officials deny having reassured Egypt about the aid, but acknowledge having lobbied Washington to protect it.

“When Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, proposed an amendment halting military aid to Egypt, the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee sent a letter to senators on July 31 opposing it, saying it “could increase instability in Egypt and undermine important U.S. interests and negatively impact our Israeli ally.” Statements from influential lawmakers echoed the letter, and the Senate defeated the measure, 86 to 13, later that day.”

It is still the same old story. In order to ensure Israel’s superiority in the region, Western powers are ready to support any murderous Arab tyrant… But this doesn’t reduce any millimeter from the value of Arab Democracy – it just says that the Arab will continue to pay a high price in the struggle for freedom and democracy as long as the racist colonization of Palestine continues to be the major aim of imperialist policy in the region.

Just as the thunder is duly followed by lightning, the massacre in Cairo this morning (Saturday, July 27) is the expected and natural result of the military coup that ousted the first democratically elected Egyptian president, Mohammad Morsi, on July 3.

The politicians that called upon the army to topple the government can’t say that they didn’t expect it, that they are not responsible.

It is not the people’s army that took control of Egypt, but the same rotten “DeepState” establishment that stood at the center of the corrupt dictatorship for decades. It is led by General A-Sisi that was involved in Human Rights violations against demonstrators at the first period after Mubarak’s fall. The new president is the same Mubarak era judge, Adly Mansour, which overturned the law that prevented senior leaders of the old regime from participating in the elections.

The bullets were directed at the heads and chests of the demonstrators, as the BBC correspondent, between others, reported from the scene of the massacre near Rabaa al-Adawia mosque. Those bullets were not directed only at the supporters of president Morsi, but at the heart of the Egyptian people. They were shot at the service of the same corrupt and impotent class that enslaved and robbed the Egyptian people for thousands of years. They came to stop the revolution from freeing the Egyptian people and to ensure the continuation of the rulers’ class privilege.

Western Complicity

The green light for the massacre was given by the Egyptian officers’ real bosses – their mentors in the US administration. The clearest signal was the refusal of Mr. Obama to call the coup a coup. They didn’t call for the immediate restoration of democracy but immediately continued their working relationship with the generals and their puppets as the legitimate government of Egypt. They didn’t even ask about the whereabouts of president Morsi that was kidnapped and held incommunicado in an unknown location.

Reading the BBC news about this morning’s events, I failed to find any mention of the word Massacre. Their correspondents on the ground reported about “pools of blood”, “bullet wounds… especially in the head” and shooting of automatic rounds. But the carefully worded item summarized it all as “clashes between the army and protesters”.

All told, A-Sisi is “Our man in Cairo”… Like Chile’s Pinochet, Argentina’s Videla, Indonesia’s Suharto, Congo’s Mobuto and most war criminals over the last century. It is no wonder that Wall Street Journal, a highly respected mouthpiece of Big Capital, called openly in an editorial on July 4 for A-Sisi to be Egypt’s Pinochet.

The Palestinian Litmus Test

For all those that might have lost their heads from the propaganda against the Muslim Brothers and the appearance of millions anti-Morsi demonstrators on the streets on June 30, the generals didn’t leave a minute for doubt where do they head.

Their very first step as they arrested the Egyptian president was to impose full siege of the Palestinian Gaza strip.

Since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the Mubarak regime took an active part in guarding Israel’s siege of the strip – the first chunk of Palestinian land to gain independence from the colonialist occupation. After Hamas, the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brothers, won the first semi-democratic Palestinian elections on January 2006, Israel, with Egyptian cooperation, tightened the siege to the verge of starving the population.

Over the last two years the Egyptian revolution brought relief and relative prosperity to Gaza’s embattled people. But during the last month the Egyptian army is waging a crazy campaign to destroy the tunnels that became Gaza’s life-lines and tighten the siege again.

Poetry

While politicians, like bloggers, pour a stream of words, long sentences that twist and complicate reality, Generals are like poets. With short words, which reveal emotion more than calculated sophistication, they scratch open the wounds in one’s sleeping soul.

So revealing was the declaration that President Morsi is now no more kidnapped but legally detained for interrogation on two criminal charges: Conspiring with Hamas and fleeing from Mubarak’s prison.

The first charge is a medal of honor for any Arab nationalist and for every freedom lover around the world – as Hamas is only defined as a “terrorist organization” for its resistance to Israel’s occupation.

The second charge can clearly be directed at any of the millions of Egyptians who broke the laws of the dictatorship and fought their way to freedom.

Defending Democracy

By resisting the military coup, the people that demonstrate today in Cairo and all over Egypt, putting their lives in danger, braving with their bare chests the army’s snipers, are now the first line of defense for the Arab Spring – the hope of 350 million Arabs (and many more people around the world) to leave in true democracy.

After the people awakened, after they felt the power of the mass movement and experienced the ability of the revolution to topple regimes, no new dictator will sit safely on his bayonets.

But first we should pay respects to the martyrs. It is the time for mourning, for Human Solidarity and for reflection on morality and truthfulness.

“Marcos, the quintessential anti-leader, insists that his black mask is a mirror, so that ‘Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10 p.m., a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains’. In other words, he is simply us: we are the leader we’ve been looking for.”